Publications
The integration of process monitoring for safeguards
The Separations and Safeguards Performance Model is a reprocessing plant model that has been developed for safeguards analyses of future plant designs. The model has been modified to integrate bulk process monitoring data with traditional plutonium inventory balances to evaluate potential advanced safeguards systems. Taking advantage of the wealth of operator data such as flow rates and mass balances of bulk material, the timeliness of detection of material loss was shown to improve considerably. Four diversion cases were tested including both abrupt and protracted diversions at early and late times in the run. The first three cases indicated alarms before half of a significant quantity of material was removed. The buildup of error over time prevented detection in the case of a protracted diversion late in the run. Some issues related to the alarm conditions and bias correction will need to be addressed in future work. This work both demonstrates the use of the model for performing diversion scenario analyses and for testing advanced safeguards system designs.